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If you follow the Twitter account of Niantic CEO John Hanke, you may have noticed some unusual behavior from him. That’s because the hacking group OurMine has taken control of his Twitter account today, July 31, 2016. OurMine has previously been involved with (or claimed credit for) a number of attacks, ranging from Pokémon GO server downtime, to hacking the Twitter account of Sony President Shuhei Yoshida.

This attack follows earlier reports that multiple third-party Pokémon GO tracking sites have been shut down at the request of Niantic – Hanke had previously stated in an interview with Forbes that he was “not a fan“ of these third-party sites. While Hanke did state in this interview that Niantics priorities were in strengthening the notoriously unstable Pokémon GO servers, he would be considering taking action against these sites as they violate the Pokémon GO Terms of Services by taking data from the game.

However, at this time, OurMine is claiming on Hanke’s Twitter account that this attack was done not in response to the discontinuing of these third-party tracking websites, but for Brazilian Pokémon GO players. This is confirmed in an article from Forbes staff writer Ryan Mac, who interviewed a member of OurMine. This member says that this attack was to test Hanke’s security, and also for “brazil & argentina & chile [sic]”. Mac also notes that OurMine targeted other social media accounts of Hanke, including his private Facebook and Foursquare accounts (possibly his Quora account, due to OurMine mentioning Quora in some of his tweets, like the one seen below).

https://twitter.com/johnhanke/status/759824188177805312

At the time of writing this article, Niantic has not publicly commented on this attack on their CEOs Twitter account.

Stay tuned to TechRaptor for further information regarding this development.

What are your thoughts on this? Despite what the OurMine member said in the Forbes article, do you think it has to do with today’s actions against third-party Pokémon GO tracking websites? Let us know in the comment section below.

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